Motion capture is a mechanism often used in the movie recording industry for recording movement and translating the movement onto a digital model. In particular, in the movie industry, motion capture involves recording of actions of human actors and using that recorded information to animate a digital character model in 3-dimensional (3D) animation.
In a typical motion capture session, an actor may wear recording devices, sometimes called markers, at various locations on their body. A computing device may then record motion from changes in a position or angle between the markers. Acoustic, inertial, LED, magnetic and/or reflective markers may be used to obtain the changes. This recorded data may then be mapped to a 3D animation model so that the model may then perform the same actions as that of the actor. Often, camera movements can also be motion captured so that a virtual camera in the scene may pan, tilt, or perform other actions, to enable the animation model to have a same perspective as the video images from the camera.
While motion capture does provide rapid or even real time results, motion capture also has several disadvantages. For example, motion capture often requires reshooting of a scene when problems occur. Moreover, because live actors are used, movements that might not follow the laws of physics generally cannot be motion captured. Moreover, where the computer model has different proportions to that of the actor, the captured data might result in unacceptable artifacts due to recording intersections of data, or the like. Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.